Improbable Women: Five Who Explored the Middle East

2. Hester’s World

21 2 Hester’s World End of the Roman Empire—Islam— Crusades—Ottoman Empire—Trade from East to West—French Revolution—Napoleon’s Invasion of Egypt—The Grand Tour While Zenobia slipped into the mists of time, Aurelian, who led her into Rome in golden chains, came to a conclusive end. In 275 CE his personal secretary, Eros, began to fear that Aurelian was planning to have him killed, and in a preemptive move prepared a fake “hit list” containing the names of army officers and saw to it that the list was circulated among the troops. A group of the listed officers assassinated Aurelian, and when they learned of Eros’s treachery, killed him as well. Within a century, the empire had become unwieldy and began to crack with an administrative separation into Eastern and Western Empires with the Eastern capitol at Constantinople. Two centuries after Zenobia’s defeat, the Western Roman Empire itself left the stage, ending a remarkable thousand-year run that had begun with the founding of the Roman Republic. The Eastern Empire continued into the fifteenth century, when the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople. About a century after Rome lost its empire and power shifted to Constantinople, a tribe known as the Quraysh settled in the town of Mecca not far from the western coast of the Arabian Peninsula. The Quraysh were pagans, as were the majority of the people in Arabia . They worshipped many gods and believed that rituals could 22 • Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope be devised to influence those gods. There were a few Jewish tribes, mostly in the north near the town of Yathrib, now known as Medina, and there were very few Christians. The valley of Mecca was already holy and a place of pilgrimage . The Ka´aba, a cube-shaped granite structure with a sacred black stone embedded in its eastern corner, was ancient even then and was dedicated to the Nabatean god Hubal, a god that Zenobia was likely to have worshipped. Somewhere around 570 CE a man named Muhammad was born in Mecca. A contemplative man, he tended to wander alone among the rocks, hills, and cliffs of the sere landscape, and at some point he had a supernatural experience in which he was visited and commanded by the angel Gabriel. Later generations described this as “The Night of Destiny.” There were additional visitations and visions in which he received text as if by dictation; after his death this text became the Quran. His role as a messenger of God, a prophet, put him in conflict with the powerful pagan families of Mecca, and in 622 he left Mecca and traveled to Yathrib (Medina), two hundred miles north. This journey is known as the hijra, or flight, and the Prophet Muhammad’s eventual return to Mecca is the basis for the modern pilgrimage known as the hajj, one of the five “Pillars of Islam.” (The other four are shahada, profession of faith; salah, prayers; zakat, giving of alms; and sawm, fasting during the Islamic month of Ramadan.) The year of the hijra, 622, has come to be considered the beginning of the Muslim Era, which was followed by an astonishing expansion by conquest. Vast armies of mounted warriors led by fluttering green banners and trailed by clouds of dust rode out in all directions to extend the rule of Islam east to the Aral Sea and west to the Atlantic Ocean in less than one hundred years. The wave of Arab conquest crested about 750 CE and began to recede. Berbers supplanted Arabs in North Africa; Persians and Kurds dominated east of the Euphrates. In the eleventh century when William the Conqueror led his Normans to victory in England and was crowned William I, the Muslim Seljuk Turks emerged from Central Asia, invaded the Byzantine Empire, and seized the area that is Hester’s World • 23 now Turkey. The Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus I asked the Roman pope for help. This was no small step given that the Greek Orthodox Church had broken with Rome years before. Though no friend of the Byzantine Empire, Pope Urban II gave a speech in 1095 asking all Christians to join in a war to help their brothers and sisters in the east and to retake the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem from “the wicked race.” Thus the Crusades were born. Thousands of people responded to the call with mass enthusiasm but...